Project Space
instagram: @thebluelotus328
The Project Space is a kind of viewing room. It is the room separate from the main gallery where privileged art buyers are taken to sip champagne and view an artist's work. For the next couple of months The Blue Lotus Foundation will be hosting some of our favourite artists. As a brief, we asked each artist three questions, their response could be in any form they desired. This month, we are featuring the work of artist, and beekeeper, Rashid Maxwell.
SELFIE: Subject and Object by Rashid Maxwell
What Fuels Your Work? It’s the impulse to say what can’t be said - or written. I want to share what comes from silence; from tranquillity and exaltation. I think it’s sometimes called post-personal or objective art. This story might illuminate the question:
There was a Chinese emperor who entrusted his court artist to paint a mural landscape in his palace. It took a year. At last the emperor and his retinue stood before the massive sky and mountains, forests, rivers, fields and lakes. At last the emperor gestured to a path that started at the foot of the mural and wound a drunken route into the distant hills. “Tell me honoured artist – where does this path lead?” “Let’s explore together,” said the artist as he took the emperor by the arm and side by side they stepped into the picture, growing ever smaller till they disappeared.
The artist and the spectator disappear in the work. Where there is ego there is no art. Art communicates the ineffable.
How Do Recent World Events Affect Your Creative Outlook? In the remote Devon village where I live nothing much has changed with Covid – just the shops come to us rather than we go to the shops. There should not be a conflict between Art and Life and yet I’ve always felt them pull me as separate, demanding masters – or is it mistresses? This split, referred to in the title, is both visible and united in the series of 24 paintings made during lockdown – from which these 8 are taken.
How do you see will your work developing? We have to walk into the next picture to explore what lies ahead.
All Images: Watercolour on paper, 210 x 297mm
What Fuels Your Work? It’s the impulse to say what can’t be said - or written. I want to share what comes from silence; from tranquillity and exaltation. I think it’s sometimes called post-personal or objective art. This story might illuminate the question:
There was a Chinese emperor who entrusted his court artist to paint a mural landscape in his palace. It took a year. At last the emperor and his retinue stood before the massive sky and mountains, forests, rivers, fields and lakes. At last the emperor gestured to a path that started at the foot of the mural and wound a drunken route into the distant hills. “Tell me honoured artist – where does this path lead?” “Let’s explore together,” said the artist as he took the emperor by the arm and side by side they stepped into the picture, growing ever smaller till they disappeared.
The artist and the spectator disappear in the work. Where there is ego there is no art. Art communicates the ineffable.
How Do Recent World Events Affect Your Creative Outlook? In the remote Devon village where I live nothing much has changed with Covid – just the shops come to us rather than we go to the shops. There should not be a conflict between Art and Life and yet I’ve always felt them pull me as separate, demanding masters – or is it mistresses? This split, referred to in the title, is both visible and united in the series of 24 paintings made during lockdown – from which these 8 are taken.
How do you see will your work developing? We have to walk into the next picture to explore what lies ahead.
All Images: Watercolour on paper, 210 x 297mm
